O Give thanks to the Lord of Lords: For His mercy endures for ever!

A Scene’s Balancing Act

To get a scene right, it takes a balance in narrative, character interspection, action, and dialogue.

Want to write the best novel ever? Wouldn’t you love to
write a book that a reader couldn’t put down?

Part of the skill needed for this to happen is to have a
compelling story, but another part of it involves balancing these three
elements of fiction: dialogue, narrative, POV character introspection, and
action.

This is an intuitive process, and you probably didn’t think
about how you wove these elements when you were writing that first draft,
however, now that you’ve nailed your plot, your characters, and your scenes,
you’re ready to zero in on these three elements as well. To do this, move
inside your characters. Now, during the revision process, when reading back
through the story, you can better identify with dialogue, narrative or action
that overtakes the scene.

The perfectly balanced scene has a perfect pitch, like a
well-balanced stringed quartet and you are the musical director.

Balance Novel Elements like a Stringed Quartet

Dialogue is like a first chair violinist who carries the
melody of a musical piece. The dialogue should always be the main emphasis in a
scene, however, dialogue should never be the only focus of a scene. Just as the
second chair violinist, the celloist, and bass player adds depth to a scene, so
also can narrative, introspection, and action.

Just as a musical score sometimes has one of the instruments
do a solo portion, if you want to highlight a particular character trait in
your viewpoint character or focus on something specific that the characters are
talking about, you don’t want the scene cluttered, the reader distracted, or
the pace slowed by action or narrative. When someone is telling you a story,
the setting, the other people around you, everything just kind of fades away,
and you’re intent only on what the other person is saying. You cut away action
and narrative and leave only your characters’ spoken words.

If an author weaves action and narrative throughout the
dialogue, slows the pace of the novel down, however, if you keep the dialogue
primary to fast-paced scene of dialogue. If a scene is just dialogue, we get
the full impact how life expresses itself in his life. When you isolate a
character’s dialogue, if the reader is paying attention, he’ll become privy to
the character’s personality and motives in a way that’s not possible in the
woven scene just because there’s too much going on.

Scene Pacing

Pacing is probably the most common fiction element to address
when considering how to weave dialogue, narrative and action. If you’re
creating a fast-paced conflict scene between two or more people, you might do
well to consider only dialogue, at least for parts of it. In this case, use
action to create movement, and use narrative and introspection only when
catching your breath.

The passage would be very effective without a bunch of
narrative bogging down the moment. The dialogue should demonstrate a
character’s feelings toward another person. Dialogue can take the protagonist
pages to tell us something in narrative, whereas a scene of dialogue can
quickly show us through that character’s own words said out loud. Narrative
explains, and dialogue blurts out.

Similar reasoning applies when writing scenes with only
narrative, character introspection, or only action. You want to focus on
something in your character’s mind or describe something that would only sound
contrived in dialogue, so you use straight narrative.

If the action needs to drive the scene forward because it’s
intense and emotional, your characters just wouldn’t be talking during this
time.

Sometimes, as in real life, there’s just nothing to say at
the moment. Always, let your characters lead the story along.

Adjusting Pace

Blending dialogue, action and narrative requires finding
your story’s rhythm. As you write our scenes, to help you determine what you
need to do in your rewrites, consider answering these questions about your story.

Ask yourself:

Is the story moving a little too slowly, and do I need to speed
things up? (Use dialogue.)

Is it time to give the reader some background on the
characters so they’re more sympathetic? (Use narrative, dialogue or a
combination of the two.)

Do I have too many dialogue scenes in a row? (Use action or narrative
to break it up.)

Are my characters constantly confiding in others about
things they should only be pondering in their minds (use narrative).

Do I need to get out of my character’s head because a
conversation would be more effective? (Use dialogue.)

Does this scene have too much dialogue? Narrative? Action? (Insert
more of the deficient elements.)

Do my characters provide too many artificially created
background details as they talk? (Use narrative.)

Revealing Character Motive

Whether we’re using dialogue, action or narrative to move
the story forward, any or all three of these elements reveal character motives.
Your story’s dialogue can reveal motive in a way that’s natural, because
whether we’re aware of it or not, we reveal our own motives all the time in our
everyday lives. Understanding a character’s motive is to understand the
character.

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